Stoutner

Programs that respect your privacy

Author: Soren Stoutner

  • Privacy Browser Android 3.13

    Privacy Browser 3.13 was released on 30 December 2022. It fixes a crash caused by Privacy Browser sometimes trying to calculate the scroll position when the WebView doesn’t exist. There is no way I can think of that should cause this to happen, but crash logs indicate it does (gotta love Android). It also fixes…

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  • User Agent Problems

    User agents are strings that the browser sends in the header of every HTTP request that identifies itself, like Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 13; Pixel 5 Build/TP1A.221105.002; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/108.0.5359.128 Mobile Safari/537.36. They tend to be quite long because they contain a brief history of the internet, but serve no real purpose…

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  • Spammers Have No Shame

    I just received the following email with the subject line of “Programs that respect your privacy”. Soren –  Seemingly not talked about enough, it’s amazing how much of our information is out there controlling us. I noticed that you currently aren’t showing ads on stoutner. I was wondering if this is a conscious decision or…

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  • Privacy Cell 1.9

    Privacy Cell 1.9 has been released. The target API has been bumped to 33 (Android 13). A problem was fixed on Android 13 that allowed the realtime monitoring notifications to be accidentally dismissed via swiping. Per-app language support has been enabled on Android 13. The Settings scroll location is now restored on restart, such as…

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  • Privacy Browser 3.7

    Privacy Browser 3.7 has been released. It includes a major refactor of how Privacy Browser interacts with the Android file system. Beginning with Android 11 (API 30), Android is enforcing new storage restrictions called scoped storage. Under scoped storage, the Storage Access Framework allows apps to access files without requiring the READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE and WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permissions.…

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  • Privacy Browser 3.12.2

    Privacy Browser 3.12.2 contains a fix for a problem with WebView’s dark mode on API 29 – 32 (Android 10 – Android 12L) that was introduced with the switch to target API 33 in Privacy Browser 3.12. Initially this was fixed for only API 33 (unless you had a really old and insecure WebView), but…

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  • Privacy Browser 3.12.1

    Privacy Browser 3.12.1 is an emergency release to fix a crash. The transition to SwitchPreferenceCompat in Privacy Browser 3.12 was incomplete. Specifically, it was not possible for the new SwitchPreferenceCompat to set default values. As no new preferences (settings) were added in 3.12, this did not cause any problems for upgrades from 3.11. But it…

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  • Privacy Browser 3.12

    Privacy Browser 3.12 has been released. This adds a link to WebView DevTools in the navigation menu. There is an entire post about WebView DevTools. I won’t repeat most of it here except to say that changes made in WebView DevTools affects all WebViews on a device, not just those inside Privacy Browser. Currently the…

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  • Why I Insist People Use the Forums and Issue Trackers

    From time to time I come across people who are frustrated when I insist that they use the forums and the issue trackers to communicate with me regarding the project. Instead of having to explain my reasoning over and over again, I thought it would be valuable to post it here. When I first started…

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  • The X-Requested-With Header

    Information in this post regarding workarounds and long-term solutions has been superseded in Privacy Browser 3.12 by access to WebView’s DevTools. I leave the original post for historical reasons and because it might be of interest to some readers. As mentioned is several places on this website and in the app, there are some negative…

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